# Christianity, A.D. 138

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Nosratollah Rassekh, Christianity, A.D. 138, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> WORLD ORDER: SPRING/SUMMER 1980 VOLUME 14, NUMBERS 3 & 4, (Pg 7-21)
> 
> Christianity, A.D. 138
> The First of Three Studies on Religion and Society
> BY NOSRATOLLAH RASSEKH
> 
> Already in the space of less than a century the operation of the mysterious processes generated by its
> creative spirit has provoked a tumult in human society such as no mind can fathom. Itself undergoing
> a period of incubation during its primitive age, it has, through the emergence of its slowly-
> crystallizing system, induced a fermentation in the general life of mankind designed to shake the very
> foundations of a disordered society, to purify its life-blood, to reorientate and reconstruct its
> institutions, and shape its final destiny.
> 
> -Shoghi Effendi
> 
> While that great body [the Roman Empire] was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow
> decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men, grew up in silence
> and obscurity, derived vigour from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the Cross
> on the ruins of the Capitol.
> 
> -Edward Gibbon
> 
> The good emperor Hadrian died in A.D. 138. The Romans had good reason to grieve over the
> death of a ruler who for twenty-one years had given them peace, prosperity, and an efficient
> government. Less warlike than his predecessor, Trajan, Hadrian had, by returning Mesopotamia and
> Assyria to the Parthian king, helped to stabilize the boundaries of the Empire. In Germany he had
> erected protective walls against the barbarians. In Great Britain he had raised Hadrian's wall, which
> ran across the narrow part of the island, from the Slway Firth to Wallsend on the Tyre, to mark the
> northern boundary of Roman Britain.
> 
> In avoiding foreign wars Hadrian had been free to concentrate on domestic affairs. He had
> raised the material splendor of the Empire through a magnificent building program. He had built for
> himself a sumptuous villa at Tivoli, with a fine view of nearby Rome, and a large tomb on the banks
> of the Tiber, an edifice that in the Middle Ages was to become the papal fortress of Castel Sant'
> Angelo. Hadrian’s Pantheon, like so many other buildings of his time, represented Roman
> architecture at its best. Its domed roof of a single enormous concrete case, over 140 feet across, was
> indeed a magnificent engineering accomplishment.
> 
> The emperor had been an ardent traveler. Twelve out of the twenty-one years of his reign he
> had traveled all over the Empire, restoring old cities and establishing new cities in Egypt, Asia Major,
> and the Balkans. To correct the unequal distribution of governmental powers between Italy and the
> 
> provinces, he appointed more provincials to high offices. Indeed, Hadrian himself and Trajan had
> come originally from Italica, a small town in Spain, the first real provincials to become emperors.
> During Hadrian’s reign almost half of the senators were of provincial origin.
> 
> Not only was life secure in A.D. 138, but it was pleasant. Throughout the Empire, from the
> ancient land of Egypt to the new province of Gaul and the newest province of Britain, country
> gentlemen lived in unparalleled luxury. Stories and sermons have created the impressions that the
> Romans spent half their time in dissipation and the other half in persecuting Christians. But no empire
> could have lasted for so many centuries on a diet of undiluted wickedness. No energy would have
> been left to create a culture!
> 
> The Roman appetite for pleasure was, indeed, colossal. Zest for the spectacular in
> entertainment was most luridly expressed in the “games.” Circus Maximus seated at least two
> hundred thousand spectators. Chariot racing and gladiatorial contests attracted enormous crowds. The
> proletariat formed the bulk of the audience, but boxes were reserved for senators, the Vestal Virgins,
> and the emperor. Various combinations of contestants provided entertainment. Gladiators were
> selected from among slaves, though the career was also open to freemen. A man in heavy armor with
> a short sword could be pitted against a lightly armed adversary who had a net for entangling the other.
> Groups of men fought each other. Men were matched against beasts and beasts against beasts. At the
> lunch break, for those who stayed, a minor attraction offered was the spectacle of condemned
> criminals with inadequate weapons combating hungry animals.
> 
> A more usual and more spectacular entertainment was, however, provided by the baths. Some
> were private, but the most famous were those public mammoth structures, covering the equivalent of
> a modern city block and accommodating fifteen hundred to three thousand bathers at one time. The
> old Pennsylvania Station in New York City was modeled on the Baths of Caracalla. There were
> warm, hot, and cold baths and a prototype of saunas. The heating of the water was accomplished by
> an elaborate system of furnaces and piping; the Roman achievement in this area alone should be a
> source of great satisfaction for those modern critics who gauge the level of a culture by its plumbing.
> 
> Yet the Roman did not go to the baths just to get clean. There was space for athletic games
> and for moderate exercise. There were libraries and lecture and concert halls - testimonies to the
> Greek theory that a sound mind could exist only in a sound body.
> 
> The world of the Romans in the year 138 was not limited to spectacular sports and the
> inexhaustible search for physical pleasures. There was their own Empire to be explored. Many
> Romans became tourists and went to see the wonders of ancient Greece, the magnificent landscape of
> Syria, and the awesome sights of Egypt. Like all good tourists they left not only their money but their
> scribblings on the pyramids and the statues. Traveling on the Mediterranean Sea was safe and easy. A
> large and comfortable ship could take the traveler from the magnificent harbor built by Claudius at
> the mouth of the Tiber to Spain in seven days, to Alexandria in ten. Though there were no good
> hotels, letters of introduction to wealthy local citizens did guarantee comfortable quarters. A wealthy
> Roman could send his son to “college” in Athens, then send him a bank-draft, and in a week the
> young man would be spending the money.
> 
> Roads that radiated from the Golden Milepost in the Forum were to be the arteries of the
> thriving life of Roman civilization for ages to come as they had been for ages past. The speed of
> travel in 138 was as high as any in Europe or America before the age of the steam engine seventeen
> hundred years later. The roads were better than any in eighteenth-century Europe.
> 
> Postal services were instituted connecting the new provinces with the capital and were placed
> under the control of the state during Hadrian’s reign. Water was brought from distant lakes by
> aqueducts whose giant strides across the landscape symbolized the majesty and permanence of Rome.
> These structures are an awesome sight even today.
> 
> Incredible though it may seem, the same people who could indulge in orgies of cruelty
> produced great works of art, literature, and engineering. While the masses were amused by mimes
> who reveled in the buffoonery of low comedy, the educated Romans found pleasure in the social
> comedies of Menander as interpreted by his imitator Plautus.
> 
> The literature of the second century, written in both Greek and Latin, was rich and still
> excelled in purity of style. It had breadth and depth. Tacitus wrote his Annals and his Germania,
> providing not only information on facts, conditions, and characters of the past but also on thought and
> judgment about the affairs of man in general. Plutarch wrote his Lives with sharp character studies
> and, almost a generation later, Suetonius was to write his magnificent Lives of the Twelve Caesars.
> Among imaginative writers, Juvenal, Apuleius, and Lucian stood out for their satirical descriptions of
> contemporary society. Galen wrote medical treatises that would be basic texts for more than a
> thousand years and laid down principles of therapy. Ptolemy, a mathematician and astronomer,
> described the earth, drew a picture of Cosmos, and wrote essays dealing with cartography, harmony,
> and optics. In philosophy, the age of Cicero and Seneca had passed; but Epictetus (60-140) wrote on
> epicureanism; and the best known philosopher of the second century, the emperor Marcus Aurelius,
> who composed his Meditations in Greek and eloquently prescribed the Stoic virtues, was yet to come.
> 
> The Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, the Tomb of Hadrian, all bear witness to the ability of
> the Romans to combine utility and daring engineering techniques, evidenced by the application of
> broad and high arches and mighty roof constructions.
> 
> Triumphal arches, victory columns, and baths erected during this period are among the
> outstanding monuments of ancient times. The relief sculptures adorning all these monuments
> represent the greatest of Roman art.1 Free standing statues, though mostly copies of Greek sculpture,
> were still among the finest of their kind.
> 
> In 138 Rome was a thriving Empire. The Pax Romana extended from Britain to the Caspian
> Sea, from the Rhine and the Danube to the Sahara. The Empire stretched more than 1,250,000 square
> miles and included more than 100 million people, representing many races, nationalities, and creeds.
> The signs of the Empire's permanency seemed apparent everywhere. The Temple of Janus, built by
> 
> Hadrian's predecessor Trajan was primarily a soldier. His military exploits are recorded on the famous victory column in
> Trajan's forum. The reliefs covering the column unfold a wonderful picture book of his campaigns. The column itself is 100
> feet high, and the 150 relief scenes, if unrolled, would be more than 650 feet long.
> Numa at the beginning of the Republic, still survived; and the new Pantheon, little more than a
> quarter-century old, gave every indication that it would remain unconquered by the passing centuries.
> 
> The emperorship of Trajan (98-117) had opened a series of successful reigns under the
> Flavian dynasty. This was the era of “Five Good Emperors.” For the next hundred years the new
> emperor was always a mature person with wide experience in public affairs, selected because of his
> ability and not because of family or place of birth.
> 
> Decade after decade of peace and good government had made their mark in a manner rarely
> equaled by any imperial power in history. The imperial administration, both central and provincial,
> had become the most extensive and detailed structure that the Mediterranean world had known. Its
> operations were governed by a professional code of efficiency, reasonable honesty, and support of
> Greco-Roman culture. The surviving letters between Trajan and Pliny the Younger, the governor of
> Bithynia (in Northwest Asia Minor) are testimonies to the sincere efforts of ruler and agent alike to
> secure the welfare of the governed.2
> 
> All of civilization seemed embraced in one world, and no one of the generation of Hadrian
> could remember when it had not been thus. The Empire had created a concept of “civilization” that
> was an impressive phenomenon and perhaps the most enduring legacy of the peculiarly Roman
> genius. Benefiting from the many links, including common institutions, laws, customs, commerce
> without barriers, and cultural connections, the Hellenizing and Romanizing process was speeded up,
> and a feeling of unity unprecedented in history had developed. The long survival of the Empire owed
> more to this spiritual unification than to any other factor.3
> 
> Hadrian had ruled an empire at its golden age, because it was also primarily an age of law.
> Legally far more gifted than the Greeks, the Romans were masters in fitting their statutes to
> circumstances of the moment, in adapting laws to the changing needs of new conditions; and,
> transcending their limited horizons in science, they could determine principles from any single
> instance.
> 
> For many centuries Roman law was a mixture of written statutes and unwritten customs. The
> Twelve Tables were written, as were many proceedings of the Senate and the Comitias and also the
> edicts and rescripts of emperors; but many customs in Rome had the force of law; and the
> international code, the jus gentium, was largely unwritten custom.
> 
> Under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian specially qualified jurists had collected and codified
> the existing body of judicial decisions and made important additions. An imperial court of appeal was
> created. Ideas of a supreme “unwritten” law applicable to all men (jus naturale) were becoming
> widely accepted.
> 
> See pp. 17-18.
> In the West Romanization was usually accompanied by the acceptance of the Latin language and Roman culture. In the East
> the Empire remained basically Hellenic in language and outlook, though some Roman customs-for example, gladiatorial
> games-were adopted. But the upper classes everywhere more and more assumed the same political and cultural values.
> 
> For many generations the praetor’s edict had been one of the chief sources of law. This was a
> statement of the praetor (who had been the highest judge under the Republic) of the rules of law that
> would apply during his term of office. The edict had tended to become standardized over the years,
> but it was still neither wholly official nor completely set. Hadrian asked a leading Roman lawyer to
> consult past records and prepare a final and authoritative version of the praetor’s edict. The lawyer
> Salvius Julianus produced a version of the edict that became an enduring part of the law. This
> formulation of Roman law was one of the great achievements of western man. It was not perfect-no
> law is-but it was a great improvement over all earlier legal systems and has probably not been
> surpassed by any later ones. It was based on justice and equity - the Romans themselves described it
> as “the art of fairness and goodness,” or “a continuing desire to give every man his due.” It was
> comprehensive, flexible, and subtle; there were few situations that could not be brought under one of
> its rules. Though it did not eliminate class distinctions, it did admit that even the humblest man had
> some rights - for example those of slaves against their masters.
> 
> Justinian’s great compilation some four hundred years later was largely based on the work of
> the second-century jurists; through his code Roman law has, to the present time, affected the
> jurisprudence of almost every country in the world.
> 
> The death of Hadrian was not the end of an epoch. The three Antonine Emperors - Antoninus
> Pius (138- 161), Marcus Aurelius (161-180), and Commodus (180-192) were to carry on the tradition
> of peace and prosperity for more than half a century. Gibbon believed that the years from 96 to 180
> constituted the happiest period in the history of the human race. Today we can question his
> assumptions, but certainly the Roman Empire during this period did experience the most prosperous
> and least troubled time in its entire history. The impression is not mine only. Those who lived in the
> era believed it to be so. Pliny the Elder talked of the “immense majesty of the Roman peace,” and to a
> writer of the late second century it was
> 
> a world everyday better known, better cultivated, and more civilized than before.
> Everywhere roads are traced, every district is known, every country opened to commerce.
> Smiling fields have invaded the forests; Rocks and herds have routed the wild beasts; the
> very sands are sown, the rocks are planted; the marshes drained. There are now as many
> cities as there were once solitary cottages. Reefs and shoals have lost their terrors. Wherever
> there is a trace of life there are houses and human habitations, well ordered governments and
> civilized life.4
> 
> Writing during the rule of Augustus, Virgil had expressed the “mission” of the Empire:
> 
> Others shall beat out the breathing bronze to softer lines ... shall draw living lineaments from
> the marble; the cause shall be more eloquent on their lips; their pencils shall portray the
> pathways of heaven, and tell the stars in their arising: be thy charge, O Roman, to rule the
> 
> Tercullian, Concerning the Soul, quoted in S. Kutz's The Decline of Rome and the Rise of Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
> Univ. Press, 1955), p. 153.
> nations in thine empire; this shall be thine art, to ordain the law of peace, to be merciful to
> the conquered and beat the haughty down. 5
> 
> Two centuries later the mission had been accomplished. Within the borders of an empire lived
> Greeks, Slavs, Jews, Phoenicians, Egyptians, North Africans, Iberians, Italians, Celts, Germans, and
> many others. The Romans had, out of these strands of many hues, woven a single fabric and created a
> civilization not of Rome but of the Roman world, a civilization that seemed destined to go on forever.
> 
> IN THE YEAR 138, then, what were the prospects for Christianity, still considered by the
> overwhelming majority of the Romans as the faith of obscure enthusiasts, originating from a despised
> Oriental people, to triumph over the acme of Greco-Roman civilization? Christianity was as yet still
> exclusively a faith and a movement, rather than a Church or an institution.
> 
> The birth of Christ and the Christian Faith had passed almost unnoticed by the people of the
> time. At His birth the Mediterranean peoples were celebrating an earthly redeemer –Augustus - who
> had changed chaos into order, to whom they yielded liberty but from whom they secured the
> blessings of peace and prosperity. The Roman world almost universally expressed gratitude for
> benefits received from the man who had been born “as a common piece of good luck for all
> mankind,” and who had “surpassed all past and future benefactors.” 6
> 
> While Christianity was inconspicuously attempting to survive, Augustus during his
> remarkable reign had made a spectacular attempt to stem the rising tide of moral change that had
> developed in the late Republic by enacting a comprehensive program of social, religious, and moral
> reforms. Adultery, previously widely condoned, had become a public crime with severe penalties.
> Childless couples were penalized. Special benefits were rendered to those with children. Horace was
> elegantly expounding in his Odes the virtues of the Romans of the Augustan Age: frugality, hardiness,
> and simplicity. Virgil painted the ideal figure: sober, tenacious, pious, and a slave to duty. Livy
> proudly traced the history of Rome from its humble beginnings to his own day, filling it with patriotic
> and moral examples.
> 
> The best preserved monument of the age, the Altar of Peace, is a simple structure surrounded
> by walls decorated with friezes whose serenity and order to this day convey a profound sense of the
> Augustan peace. No wonder that Mytilene declared that, “if anything more honorific than all these
> enactments is discovered in after times, the zeal and piety of our city will not be lacking in anything
> that can deify him even more.” 7
> 
> Against this background of the Augustan system, Christianity had crept, half hidden, along the
> foundations of society. It did not burst out in a flame of conquest as Islam would six centuries later.
> Its history was ignored by pagans and Christians alike. To the pagans its very obscurity left little to
> chronicle. If it had changed the lives of men and women, they were lives too insignificant to be
> 
> Virgil, Aeneid, trans. J. W. MacKail, Modern Library (New York: Random, 1934), p. 126.
> Martin Percival Charlesworth, “Some Observations on Ruler-Cult, Especially in Rome,” Harvard Theological Review, 1935,
> reprinted as a monograph (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935), p. 27.
> Ibid.
> noticed by history. Christianity had not won more than a disdainful paragraph - in Tacitus - at the
> hands of Roman historians.8
> 
> Christians themselves saw little point in recording the history of their Faith when the second
> coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the heavenly kingdom was expected soon. Focusing
> on that kingdom, Christ’s followers minimized their care about this mortal and transient one. Their
> faith centered attention less on this world than on the world to come. Immortality for the individual
> was a doctrine shared by some other mystery religions of the pagan world; but only Christianity had
> developed - out of the apocalyptic literature of the Jews - the vaster dream of an imminent cataclysm
> in which the eternal kingdom would come for all at once.
> 
> Christ Himself had written nothing at all. The first Christians, expecting His immediate return,
> recorded nothing of their memories and impressions of Jesus until probably two decades after His
> crucifixion. Historians cannot determine what the Gospel really was in those few years of His
> ministry and soon after. For the historian to discuss in detail the life of Christ would be unsound since
> the source material is almost entirely in the Gospels, and those records of the work and the words of
> Jesus were not written down until the first flush of hope that He would soon return had passed away.9
> 
> A century after the Crucifixion, Christianity was slowly developing a powerful literature of its
> own. However, while the scanty texts of the sayings and doings of its Founder were taking the shape
> in which we have them now, a Plutarch was writing biographies of the pagan heroes. No Christian
> Herodotus had appeared to gather its details, no Christian Polybius to weld it into the world’s history
> with scientific insight and critical acumen. No Christian Plutarch appeared for another three hundred
> years, and then all that the learned Jerome was able to present to us was a few paragraphs on the lives
> of the leading Apostles.
> 
> Not only are the events surrounding Christ’s life historically a blur, but so were at first the
> meaning of His mission and teachings.10 He had not erected a system of philosophy. He had issued a
> set of principles, each with great power in itself, but left as isolated pronouncements. Furthermore,
> they were expressed in parables that could be interpreted in different ways.
> 
> The crystallization of creed was affected by the conditions of the time. The crucifixion was, in
> the eyes of most observers, just another public execution. The question of the resurrection on the third
> day is no more amenable to historical judgment than are the miracles. But what does matter
> historically is that Christ’s followers did believe and that the small group about the disciples carried
> on the propagation of their Faith. Within twenty years after the Crucifixion there were strong
> 
> See p. 17.
> Even the date of the birth of Jesus is subject to historical debate. He was probably born between 8 and 4 B.C. The Gospel
> account has Him born in the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C., and who, moreover, had ordered at the time the
> killing of all children under two years of age (Matt. 2: 16). Luke connects the event with a Roman census when Palestine
> became a province in A.D. 6. The crucifixion then probably occurred in A.D. 29, 30, or 33.
> The first generation of the so - called higher critics of the Bible in the nineteenth century mostly German historians who were
> proud of their new techniques of historical research - went too far in their assumption that because the life of Jesus is not
> documented in the sense that the life of any great modern personality is documented, we must assume that the Gospel account
> is merely fiction. In other words, if it is not documented, it did not exist! Today most Biblical scholars believe that our
> sources give us a very faithful reflection of the life of Jesus as it seemed to that first generation of Christians.
> Christian communities in Palestine and others throughout Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece. Most
> probably there were also Christians in Alexandria and a few other localities.
> 
> The early believers were loosely organized. James, the brother of Jesus, was recognized, in a
> sense, as the head of the movement. The original disciples constituted themselves as a kind of
> governing council or, at least, a court of appeal. But apart from propagating the Faith, the main
> activity of the Christian leaders during the second half of the first century was the definition of the
> basis for the Faith and the formulation of some of the primary theological inferences in documents
> such as the first three Gospels and the letters of Paul to his contemporaries.
> 
> In the year 138 the New Testament had not as yet been arranged and accepted as the
> fundamental literature of the new religion. The Gospel according to St. Mark was the oldest, written
> by a follower of St. Peter at Rome, probably around 60. It is not rigorously historical, but it was
> intended by its author to show that Christ's passion was a proof that God had committed Himself to
> the flow of human life. The Gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Luke, both of which show
> traces that their authors knew and used Mark and other sources now lost, date from twenty to thirty
> years later. 11 The Gospel according to St. John and the Book of Revelation, date probably from the
> last decade of the first century. Of the four Gospels, three were evidently written by Jews and the
> fourth (Luke) by a Greek - speaking physician.
> 
> But the oldest part of the New Testament is the Pauline Epistles. Yet Paul himself had never
> seen Christ. Paul had been a strict Pharisee, who at first considered Jesus and His followers as
> blasphemers against the law and had taken part in the persecution of Christians. But sometime around
> 38, on the road to Damascus, according to his own testimony:
> 
> And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus
> about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me.
> 
> And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest
> thou me?
> 
> And I answered, Who art thou, lord? And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom
> thou persecutest.
> 
> And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the
> voice of him that spake to me.
> 
> And I said, What shall I do, lord? And the lord said unto me, Arise, and go into
> Damascus; and there it shall be told thee of all things which are appointed for thee to do.12
> 
> Paul turned from persecution to the greatest of Christian missionaries. Perceiving that the Faith
> could grow but very slowly in its own birthplace where the Jews were profoundly orthodox, he
> 
> One of those missing sources known to scholars as “Q” seems to have been a collection of the words of Jesus Himself, His parables
> and sermons.
> Acts 22:6-10.
> concentrated his missionary activities in the cosmopolitan cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Being a
> Roman citizen protected by Roman law and thus free to travel, Paul preached the gospel, or “good news,”
> throughout the eastern part of the Empire; and he encouraged and inspired the small Christian
> communities by sending letters to the converts.
> 
> Before him the early Christians had formed only one of many sects within the larger body of
> Judaism. They seemed to have had no clear notion of the persons to whom Christ had directed His
> message. James, Jesus’ brother, who directed the central organization at Jerusalem was a conservative
> who believed that Jesus had come to fulfill Jewish prophecies. Peter, the chosen disciple, was bolder. He
> went on to preach the new Faith in Rome where he was crucified upside down in the Vatican Circus.
> The disciple Thomas went outside of the Empire to Parthia and was said to have reached India.
> Andrew preached to the Scythians. But Paul was the boldest. He firmly believed that Christian truth
> was not a matter of habit or reasoning but of transcending faith. His Epistle to the Romans is
> considered by many to be the first great work of Christian theology. He sent it probably from Corinth,
> sometime between 56 and 59, when he was contemplating carrying his mission to the West, even to
> Spain. For this, Rome was a natural base of operations, and before sailing for Rome he wished to gain
> the approval and support of its community of Christians. Thus he wrote his epistle to the Romans,
> defining the fundamental theology of Christianity as he saw it. He explained that Christ (from
> Christos, the Greek word for Messiah, “the anointed”) was the son of God and that He had died to
> atone for the sins of mankind. Man had inherited Adam's original sin; he was inherently unrighteous -
> “There is none righteous, no, not one” - but there was a method whereby man could be justified - that
> is, “reckoned to be righteous” - even though the Law actually marks him as unrighteous. 13 The
> method whereby God delivered man from sin was called grace, the gift of salvation bestowed by God
> regardless of man’s merit or desert. God made the life of Christ the symbol of deliverance through
> grace: Christ, though sinless Himself, was sent into the world as the bearer of all men’s sins; His
> sacrifice on the Cross came so “that the body of sin might be destroyed.” 14 His salvation was
> signaled in His resurrection. Human salvation did not automatically result from the sacrificial death
> of Christ, but faith - complete trust in God’s grace as revealed in Christ - must be observed by man. If
> faith is genuine, the love that led to the sacrifice will be imitated, and man will have carried out the
> will of Christ and attained grace. The introduction of faith and love, unrecognized specifically by the
> Law, established a new relationship between man and God.
> 
> No follower of Christ was as responsible for shaping Christian doctrine as Paul, a thin man
> “little of stature, thin-haired upon the head, crooked in the legs, of good state of body, his eyebrows
> joining, and nose somewhat hooked, full of grace [who] sometimes ... appeared like a man, and
> sometimes he had the face of an angel.” 15 It was Paul, “the Apostle of the Gentiles,” who first
> appreciated the universality of the teachings of Jesus. “Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also
> of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.” 16 “For there is no difference between the Jew and the
> Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.” 17
> 
> Rom. 3:10.
> 14 Rom. 6: 16.
> “Acts of Paul and Thekla,” in M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 273.
> Rom. 3:29.
> Rom. 10:12.
> The small early Christian community had faced two great obstacles. First, Jewish Christianity
> was confined to the Jews and offered no message of salvation for the Greeks or other Gentiles.
> Second, early Christian Jews insisted that all believers in the new religion should follow the Law of
> the Old Testament to the letter. Thus, the only way to resolve the issue was to free the Christian belief
> from the strictness of Judaism, and it was Paul who found the way. He proclaimed that converts need
> not follow the detailed prescriptions of the Law. “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,
> whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free.” 18
> 
> “For the letter [of the Law] killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” 19 Paul carried the message of
> Christian universality to Syria, Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, and elsewhere, everywhere
> founding churches. Without Paul, early Christianity, some historians believe, could have remained
> another minor faith among the multitude of creeds and cults to be found throughout the Roman
> Empire.
> 
> The Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, describes the transformation
> of Christianity from the faith of a sect dominated by Jews and Jewish Law into a religion appealing
> principally to non-Jews.
> 
> Acts catapults the reader into the troubled world of first-century Palestine. Judaism under the
> pressures of foreign domination and successive waves of Greek and Roman cultural influences was a
> religion in crisis. Aristocratic Sadducees were a minority committed to a strict literal interpretation of
> the Biblical law and the support of Roman rule - and they controlled the Temple in Jerusalem. The
> Pharisees denounced the foreigners and
> 
> urged the expansion and modification of Biblical law to meet new conditions. Some other smaller
> sects such as Essenes urged the possibility of immediate redemption through a new leader, a Messiah.
> 
> Acts describes the growth and change of Christians. While the authorship is not certain, most
> scholars believe that Luke compiled it, probably sometime after the collapse of the Jewish revolt
> against the Romans in 70. The council of the early Christian leaders in Jerusalem that occupied an
> important place in the narrative of Acts, took place in 49. Luke was not personally involved in the
> earlier events he describes. He relies on the memories of older Christians and a young Christian
> tradition handed down to the second and third generation of converts and on a few written accounts of
> the first years of the new religion which have since been lost. 20
> 
> The death of St. John around 100 brought to an end the Apostolic Age. The governing center
> since Jesus’ time had remained at Jerusalem, where under James a board of disciples and seven
> deacons had acted as administrative officials. But when James was martyred by the Jews before the
> Jewish revolt of 66-70, many Christians of Jerusalem were forced to flee the city for a time, and the
> Christian churches over the Empire were to become virtually independent. Even further, the central
> 
> 1 Cor.12:13.
> 2 Cor. 3:6. Circumcision had been a hindrance that stood in the way of conversion. For adults of those days, without
> antiseptics and anesthesia, circumcision was naturally a dreadful and dangerous operation. Paul announced that Greek or
> Syrian converts need not undergo circumcision.
> See p.12.
> unity of the growing Christian communities was crippled when the Romans, after crushing the Jewish
> revolt, destroyed Jerusalem in 70. Now each church had to be governed by its own elders or
> presbyters and by 100 a leader, the Bishop was becoming dominant in each city.
> 
> In fact, the first 138 years of the Christian era were among the darkest in its entire history. In
> the course of reducing Christian principles to a logical system, differences of opinion were bound to
> spring up. Without a centralized authority or a canonic literature, unity or uniformity could not be
> expected.21 Though Christians still felt some sense of a common creed and unity against a hostile
> outside world, after the martyrdom of James, they were never able to turn toward the same focal
> point. The Churches were small and severely tested by doctrinal disagreements, and suffered from the
> dislike of pagans and Jews alike. In different provinces of the Empire there existed different systems
> of church government, and as an English Churchman has put it: “the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian,
> and the Independent can each discover the prototype of the system to which he himself adheres.” 22
> The doctrine of Apostolic Succession - that is, the belief that the powers given to the disciples of
> Christ before His ascension, were handed down from bishop to bishop by the sacrament of ordination
> - was not universally accepted. Many were against a systematic order that tended to eliminate the
> mystical and the ecstatic. Then there were the followers of Marcion (who died around 160), who,
> carrying Paul’s doctrines to their extreme, denied any connection between Christ and the God of the
> Old Testament. They were spreading widely and forming an independent church.2323 In Asia Minor,
> Montanists preached the imminent coming of the New Jerusalem and totally opposed Roman
> authority. Bishop Montanus believed that certain living believers were prophets who were continually
> receiving direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit. His followers instigated such orgies of prophecy that
> the Orthodox Church denied the need for new revelations and declared that all the truths needed for
> salvation had been completed upon the death of the evangelist St. John, the last inspired author.
> 
> Another major and long-lasting dispute was with the Gnostics, beginning even before the year
> 100. The Gnostics believed that the mastery of special knowledge (Greek: gnosis) assured salvation.
> They proceeded to elaborate complicated myths that constituted the gnosis needed for salvation. They
> attempted to incorporate the history of Jesus on earth into their mythological systems. To some
> Gnostics Jesus was the savior, but they denied His humanity as an affront to the pureness of divinity -
> nor would they accept His bodily resurrection. In 138 the leading Gnostics were Basilides and
> Valentinus. It was against them that the orthodox fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch would reaffirm
> the historical reality of Christ and His sacrifice as an act of history rather than an allegorical symbol.
> Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, in his treatise “Against the Heresies” used the Scriptures to refute the
> gnostic separation of human and supernatural in Christ and lead the way for the first systematic
> exposition of orthodoxy of belief.
> 
> Not until c. 170 was the New Testament, essentially in its present form, beginning to be regarded as authoritative
> Scripture rather than the simple evidence of the teachings of Jesus.
> 22. B. H. Steerer, The Primitive Church: Studied with special reference to the Origins of the Christian Ministry
> (New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp. viii-ix.
> Marcion, who was the bishop of Sinope (in Asia Minor), condemned the God of the Old Testament as the god of darkness and
> the Testament itself as a record of abominations. Even among the books of the New Testament he accepted as binding only the
> Gospel according to Luke and ten Epistles of St. Paul. It was in response to this challenge that the orthodox church defined its
> canon of sacred writings, virtually the modern Bible, as the basic source of Christian teaching.
> 
> In Palestine the Jewish-Christian church at Jerusalem continued under a regular line of leaders
> after James until the great revolt of 132-35. But the imperial ban on Jewish inhabitation of the city,
> thereafter, helped to reduce the Christians of Palestine who fully accepted the Judaic Law to a minor
> sect called Ebionites.
> 
> It was not just the internal disputes that threatened the survival of Christianity. Externally, in
> the year 138 Christians were facing strong challenges from other religious movements and opposition
> from the imperial government. Like the Jews, Christians made no compromises with Roman
> authorities or paganism - either with pagan polytheism or pagan morality. Early Christians viewed
> themselves as the new Israel, members of a holy nation, a chosen people facing an unbelieving and
> threatening world. From the beginning until the reign of Constantine the Great some three hundred
> years later, Christian communities remained an illegal, sometimes persecuted sect within the Empire.
> 
> Romans looked suspiciously at people who were exclusive, claimed sole possession of the
> right paths of life, denied all gods, and had such an unusual scale of values. They were suspected of
> all sorts of horrid crimes such as incest, infanticide, and ritual murder. There was a wide gulf between
> the basic principles of Christianity and those of classical civilization. Humility, charity, forgiveness,
> loving one’s neighbor as one’s self, these were not the accepted moral standard of the Greco-Roman
> world.
> 
> ROMANS were a tolerant people. But there was a practical limit to their religious freedom,
> which after all was based on no ideal of religious liberty, and certainly not on any concept of
> separation of church and state. Rome deified the emperor to give its motley collection of peoples a
> common allegiance - something like a national flag as a symbol of unity. Augustus had taken the step
> toward associating an element of divinity with his position - a public worship of two divinities (Rome
> and emperor). Thereafter, officially each emperor was designated as divus after his death - deified by
> an act of the Senate. It was an attempt to make the emperor a transcendent being and to provide a
> metaphysical basis for legitimacy and power.
> 
> But like the Jews who had refused to sacrifice to Baal, the Christians refused to adore the
> emperors. They even went beyond that. Inasmuch as the emperor pretended to be a god, he was, they
> said, in fact a devil.
> 
> Thus Rome considered Christians unpatriotic and subversive. Persecution of Christians was
> often in the form of social and economic ostracism. Contrary to the popular concept, violent physical
> persecutions were sporadic and came in some half dozen major waves over three hundred years - and
> were subject to great local variation.
> 
> The best known came very early in the year 64 and was described by Tacitus as a deliberate
> attempt of Nero to find a scapegoat for the disastrous fire in Rome. Tacitus' narrative also indicates
> how most cultivated pagans regarded the new sect. Christians were considered an unpopular social
> group rather than a religious minority:
> 
> Therefore to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the
> utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men loathed for their vices, whom the crowd sty led
> Christians. Christus the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of
> Tiberius, ... and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out
> once more, not only in Judaea, the home of the disgrace, but in the capital itself, where all
> things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. First, then, the confessed
> members of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted,
> not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race. And derision
> accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs;
> or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed, were burned to serve as lamps
> by night. 24
> 
> To Tacitus Christians were criminals, but in another generation an able and conscientious
> member of the Roman ruling class had some doubts. Pliny the Younger wrote his emperor, Trajan
> (98-117), from Bithyria in Asia Minor where he had gone as governor, that he was puzzled about
> Christians. He had not found any evil among the Christians accused before him of various wrong
> doings, except their refusal to worship the emperor or other gods. Should he punish them, he asked
> the emperor, just because they admit to being Christians, or must he have evidence of the horrid
> crimes that they were alleged to have committed. Many, he wrote the emperor, recanted and
> worshiped Trajan’s image, but he went on:
> 
> They affirmed, however, the whole of their guilt or their error, was, that they were in the
> habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses
> a hymn to Christ, as to a god and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked
> deeds, but never to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a
> trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to
> separate, and then reassemble to partake of food - but food of an ordinary and innocent kind.
> ... I judged it so much the more necessary to extract the real truth with the assistance of
> torture, from the female slaves, who were styled deaconesses; but I could discover nothing
> more than depraved and excessive superstition. 25
> 
> Emperor Trajan’s reply directed ·the governor not to search out Christians but to punish any who had
> been properly indicted:
> 
> No search shall be made for these people; when they are denounced and found guilty,
> they must be punished; with the restriction, however, that when the party denies himself to
> be a Christian, and shall give proof that he is not (that is, by adoring our gods) he shall be
> pardoned on the ground of repentance even though he may have formerly incurred
> suspicions. Information without the accuser’s name subscribed must not be admitted in
> 
> Tacitus, The Annals, trans. John Jackson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), pp. xv-xliv.
> Pliny, Letters, trans. W. Melmoth and rev. W. M. L. Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947), Book X, xcvi.
> Pliny also reported but denied the popular tales that Christians engaged in lewd activities after their celebrating agape!
> 
> evidence against anyone, as it is introducing a very dangerous precedent, and by no means
> agreeable to the spirit of the age. 26
> 
> The next systematic persecution of Christians, which lasted for three years, was not to take
> place until 235 when Maximinus was the emperor.27 But that period of persecution was confined to
> Palestine and the city of Rome. Emperor Decius instigated a general persecution in 250, and the last
> and greatest was to take place under Diocletian in the year 303.
> 
> However, the Roman Empire, though unaware, was helping rather than hindering the
> movement by providing security and order. Roman peace facilitated communication. From its very
> beginning Christianity had been a missionary faith, as the Acts of the Apostles make clear; and for
> the missionaries facilities for moving about by land and sea were better than they had ever been and
> better than they would be again for many centuries. Those Christians who scorned arms were
> protected by the might of the Roman legionaries in their pioneering efforts to convert others.
> 
> Thus, though despised and suspected, Christians still succeeded in increasing their numbers.
> The movement had been well implanted in the cities and at places even in the more conservative
> countryside, though it had made few converts among the ruling or even the wealthy class. Few
> intellectuals had embraced the Faith. In 138 the imperial cult still remained a powerful focus for
> political and economic loyalty. Yet as men were turning more and more into political ciphers, their
> attachment to the state of religion was weakening. Many thinkers and artists of the Empire reflected
> the contemporary spiritual uneasiness and void and searched for meaning in a vast, materialistic
> world. Some turned to skepticism. Sextus Empiricus in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism set down a
> rounded system of skepticism; it was considered a comfort to men to point out that “nature’s chief
> blessing, death” ended their existence. 28 Others accepted predestined Fate by their belief in astrology,
> or sought to blandish its forces by magic. Among the upper classes philosophy was used to provide a
> guideline for moral behavior, and the Stoics in particular tried the thoughtful life of self-scrutiny. But
> philosophers could offer little beyond negative, rationalistic, pessimistic preachings; and philosophy
> seldom filled the spiritual void in the heart of man. The most direct expression of man’s continuing
> search for meaning has always been in the field of religion.
> 
> In 138 the Roman world had, indeed, its share of mystic religions. The search for meaning
> was reflected in the popularity of oracles and miracle workers and the rise of a host of emotional,
> personal faiths. To some, Babylonian astrology seemed an answer. Even Ptolemy wrote a book about
> it, the Tetrabiblos. To others more personal faiths were the answer. From Egypt had come the
> Hellenized cult of Isis, a cult that provided the consolation of a future life, a consoling mother-figure
> in Isis herself, a mystic link with the great Egyptian past, and abundant miracles. Membership was
> symbolized by baptism that removed the initiate’s sins. Sarapis, Isis’ consort, judged the true believer
> upon his death and gave him everlasting life. Isis, Sarapis, and their child Harpocrates formed a
> 
> Ibid., xcvii.
> Because of the general prosperity of the second-century Empire, Roman officials frowned on popular violence against Christians
> except in a few instances where local governors were permitted persecutions to keep their provinces quiet. Thus we have the general
> account of persecution in Vienna and Lyons in 177 under Marcus Aurelius where the burned remains of Christians were thrown in
> the Rhone River to prevent their proper burial.
> Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), Vol. II, Book VII, 190, p. 635.
> sacred trinity. Each fall Sarapis was ritualistically killed and resumed life on the third day. The cult of
> Isis was popular everywhere. Next to Hadrian’s magnificent villa was an Egyptian garden dedicated
> to Isis and Osiris and filled with their monuments. Symbols of the Egyptian goddess have been found
> on the banks of the Seine, the Rhine, and the Danube.
> 
> From Iran came Mithraism with its characteristic Persian dualism and the eternal tension
> between the forces of light and darkness, Mazda and Ahriman. It promised rewards and punishments
> in future life, and Mithra himself was regarded as the intermediary between God and man. Its major
> ritual act involved the sacrifice of a bull, and the believers were baptized in the bull’s blood. The
> regular services of priests included a consecrated bread and drink. In the frontiers, Mithraism was the
> favorite religion of the legionnaires, and many legions had their underground chapel where Mithra’s
> triumph was celebrated. A third cult, that of Cybele or the Great Mother, was brought to Rome
> officially in 204 B.C. Each spring, on 25 March, the coming of the season was celebrated as the
> resurrection of her consort Attis.
> 
> In 138 Christianity to many Romans seemed but one of the mystery sects, and a Christian,
> viewing the world around, could well have been overwhelmed by the obstacles that everywhere
> prevented the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. He was a member of a minority sect,
> suspected by the government, despised by its citizens, and challenged by other cults.
> 
> By the end of the second century the church writer Tertullian (c.160 - c.230) was to tell the
> pagans: “We have filled your whole world, cities, islands, country towns, even the camps, the tribes,
> the boards of judges, the palace, the Senate, the bar. We have left you only your temples.” 29 But this
> was more a statement of hope than an expression of reality. One hundred years after Tertullian’s
> boast, Christians constituted no more than 10 percent of the population of the Empire, and 165 years
> after the death of Hadrian, Diocletian was to launch the harshest persecution of Christians yet. He
> ordered all Scriptures to be surrendered so that they could be burned. Churches were destroyed, and
> all Christian worship was suspended. Christians were stripped of civil rights and political privileges
> and were under constant threat of torture and death.
> 
> While this was happening to Christians in 303, who could have foreseen that within only nine
> years Emperor Constantine would grant freedom of worship to all Christians and would recognize the
> Church as the legal body before the law, a fact that meant the Church could not only hold property
> but accept bequests and have its own ecclesiastical courts? Who could have foreseen that the Emperor
> himself would triumph in a battle under the Christian emblem and would be baptized a Christian, and
> that at Nicaea, in the year 325, he would preside over the first ecumenical conference of Christ’s
> Church and sign the Nicene Creed as the basic document of Christian belief. 3030 Who could have
> predicted that before the century was over Theodosius the Great (379-95) would make Christianity
> the state religion of the Empire?
> 
> 29 Quoted in Harry J. Carroll, Jr. et al., ed., The Development of Civilization (Chicago: Scott, 1961), I, 15 1.
> Constantine was not baptized in fact until he was virtually on his deathbed, perhaps because by delaying he felt he could avoid the possibility
> of committing further sin, since Christians believed that baptism washed away all sins committed before baptism.
> 
> THE TRIUMPH of a once obscure, despised sect of “simple religious enthusiasts” in a
> mature, well-organized, rich, and intellectually sophisticated society is one of the most dramatic facts
> of history, subject to many different interpretations and impossible fully to explain.
> 
> Theology insofar as it concerns itself with historical events, transfers history from the realm of
> human action to that of divine grace and thus interprets the phenomena of time and change in terms
> of timeless and unchanging Deity. Human effort falls, in reality, outside of the range of humanity and
> is not significant in the unfolding of God’s will. Man thus becomes a spiritual robot, moving about as
> programmed by his Creator and is not accountable for the direction of his movement or the
> consequences of his action.
> 
> On the contrary, a revealed religion cannot be studied strictly by naturalistic-historical
> methods. Historical explanations can be given, and great generalizations are, indeed, tempting to the
> historians, but they cannot be proved. History can never explain all the conditions under which a
> revealed religion is likely to emerge.
> 
> Historians have provided us with some very reasonable explanations for the final triumph of
> Christianity in the Roman Empire. They have pointed out that in the century between the death of
> Marcus Aurelius (180) and the accession of Diocletian (284) the Empire was beset by the collapse of
> constitutional government; that the turbulence on the Persian and German frontiers caused the
> militarization of the imperial administration; that increased taxes, inflationary policies, and the
> enforced recruiting necessary to support the army and the bureaucracy shattered economic prosperity;
> that Roman citizenship, as it became more and more common, was no longer the cause of privilege
> and pride but of financial and military burdens that most Romans wanted to avoid and many
> abhorred; that the Roman army acted no longer as the guarantor of the Pax Romana but became
> involved in the political game of emperor-making; and that while the Empire floundered in anarchy
> Christianity made a sustained effort to win converts, build an organization to keep scattered groups in
> couch with each other, provide some uniformity of faith and morals, and imposed a new standard of
> virtue that furnished a corrective to the lurid imperial sins. Historians further inform us that, as the
> social structure of the Empire weakened, individual Christian churches furnished their members and
> converts a strong social and psychological unity and that Christ's message of personal immortality,
> the rewards of heaven, a lofty moral code, and sharing in loving kindness with one’s fellows on the
> earth, provided for His followers that feeling psychologists today rather bleakly call “personal
> identification.”
> 
> Historians have explained that the rise of Rome as the major Christian center in the West
> coincided with the progressive erosion of its secular power, that as the Rome of the Caesars fell, the
> Rome of the Papacy remained, that the City of God was erected over the ruins of the City of Man.
> The Pax Romana disappeared in the West, but a new international order had already emerged that
> progressively filled the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman state. The Church,
> having dealt for centuries with persecution, internal division, and external challenges, had acquired
> the spiritual resiliency and the store of political skill with which it was able to organize Europe after
> the barbarian invasions, to salvage much of the culture of the Greco-Roman world, and ultimately to
> create a whole new civilization of its own.
> 
> But all these historical explanations are pale abstractions before the fact that Christ’s message
> prevailed because it won its way into the hearts of living men and women. Its appeal was not a
> “rational” but a “spiritual” one. It triumphed because the power of its spiritual force could no longer
> be denied.
> 
> In the year 138 a Christian could well have become overwhelmed by all the obstacles around
> him. But he knew that Christ would return. Had He not told His followers: “There be some standing
> here, which shall not taste death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom”? 3131 To him
> “heaven” was no mere hope; “hell,” no mere threat. They were, like the Second Coming, certainties.
> He acted upon his faith and did not react to the outside forces. Acting upon his faith, he went about,
> quietly and obscurely, to do his share to bring about the promised day. Persecution and threat of
> persecution kept the unbelievers out. Conscious of the reality and immediacy of the emotional tie that
> Christianity forged between him and Christ, and among all those in the Christian brotherhood, the
> follower of Christ became the “Evangel” who longed to share his “good news” with Jews, Greeks,
> Romans, and all the varied folk of the Empire who were willing to listen - how could any historian
> put all of this in the cold words of history books? Christ had brought the Spirit and the guidelines; and
> fortified and guided by that Spirit, humble men, unnoticed by history - Peter, James, Paul, Luke,
> Matthew, and John - became the architects and the builders of a whole new civilization that was to be
> the foundation of Western society for the next two thousand years.
> 
> In those dark and seemingly hopeless early centuries this “multitude of obscure enthusiasts”
> did far more to change the course of history and profoundly affect the life of Western man than the
> combined efforts of all of Plutarch’s heroes, all of the Roman emperors - the “Five Good” ones and
> all the bad ones - and all of the classical philosophers and intellectuals combined. How can a historian
> explain “the operation of the mysterious processes” generated by Christ’s creative spirit that brought
> about such a transformation? All that he can write is that it happened.
> 
> Matt. 16:28. The doctrine of the Second Coming is known technically as a chiliastic belief, for this promised reign of Christ on earth
> was to last one thousand years.
>
> — *Christianity, A.D. 138 (Used by permission of the curator)*